DST scam

This last weekend our entire nation of citizens, except those in Arizona, complied with the Washington directive to change all of our clocks for the second time this year. Those who have computers with obsolete operating systems may have had to change those clocks four times already because Congress likes to tinker with time-change dates in this law that now conflict with the older programmed computer clocks. We are told that this daylight saving act is in the name of saving energy. Baloney! This act has nothing to do with saving energy. It has to do with the power of a few politicians in Washington requiring the entire population of the United States, except those in Arizona, to all comply by doing something that doesn’t really make sense.

The only savings that I witness every year with this savings act is the saving of one hour per year of wear and tear on the movement bearings in my mechanical pendulum clocks when I stop them for one hour every fall to comply with this idiotic time change.

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Comments

I hate day light savings time. Once it was for the farmers? Now it is for the stores? Some say it is for the kids walking to school. If it works for the kids, saves one life. Then ok, but I do hate it.

For the farmers? LOL The farmer works by daylight, to hell with what the clock says. It was for 8 to 5 workers so they could get off earlier and go play. Now business/banks, etc. work more hours, or some 24 hours. What does it save?

DST is nothing but a nusinence. I never could see it save energy. It's like the guy who's blanket was too short and his feet got cold. He cut off 6 inches from the top, sewed it to the bottom, pulled it up to his chin and HIS FEET STUCK OUT.

I'm wondering where the idea that it was done for farmers came from. Actually it is a problem for them because it means the supply stores close an hour earlier and that's one hour less to get repairs when equipments breaks down---which it often does during harvest. My father was a farmer and he hated DST.

Actually farmers don't necessarily work by daylight. They have to wait until the grain is dry enough to combine which may not be until several hours after sun-up. They may work until late at night or even all night---they are now up-to-date enough that they have lights on their equipment.

---hooey. other good reasons do exist for DST.
I'm so tired of the fake argument [often meant to shut down all discussion] if it saves one life then it's worth it!!!
yes, DST changes the pattern of pedestrian deaths from being hit by cars. it actually does that, and some argue it does save quite a few walkers' lives that way.
please stop the vapid "if it --- one life" before I throw up and have to get another keyboard.

"Despite China being a vast country geographically spanning several time zones the whole of China actually uses a single time-zone China Standard Time (GMT+8) all year round."

That's done to make scheduling everything easier. There's China Standard Time, that's the time zone for all of China, there's no "daylight savings time," and life is so much easier because of it.

There's another thing in China that's the law, and it should be here, but so many would cry "foul" if it were to be implemented in the USA.

The law in China is that all cell phone chargers be fully interchangeable. So, you you lose the charger for your cell phone, you go to the store and buy another. No thinking about it at all, there's a cell phone charger, or there is not a cell phone charger. Those are the only two choices available.

The savings are incalculable.

That all points to an interesting observation: Should we really be trying to promote democracy as the perfect governmental model for all nations? Many other nations do quite well without what we think of as democracy, a very good example is Singapore.

The citizens of the United States can only hope that one day our standard of living and standard of health care will be somewhere near what it is in Singapore, but that day is not decades, but centuries away.

It has worked quite well for the citizens of China since 1949, but a foreigner might be confused. And, a poll with a sample size of one foreigner, even though the result was 100%, is hardly definitive.

Saw a funny on my Facebook.
"When told about daylight savings time, a Lakota chief said, "Only a white man would cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom and call it longer.""
May be apocryphal but profound none the less.

Right on! I hate daylight savings time. It is quite a chore to change clocks on almost every electronic thing in the house, not to mention 15 or so clocks, watches, etc. I hate it being dark at 1730. Why someone with some clout hasn't stared t a movement to stop this, is beyond me. Thank you, Lynn

Lynn, apparently you dislike Standard Time. Daylight Savings Time moves the clock further ahead so that our evenings appear to have more daylight in them. Moving the clock back to standard time, and having the sun set earlier is what you do not like.

Man it is not about setting clocks. It is the MAN who has lashed us to a clock. What is time? It is what I make of it not some dude in Greenwich telling me this is a new day or I am stuck in yesterday. Carpe what ever you want!

There's no conclusive study that DST save us money. I'd rather get up early in the morning to tend to lawn and garden, jogging, etc., while it's still relatively cool outside. Never have been a fan of coming home after work and being outside when the heat index is in the 90's, or higher, and the hot sun is blazing down.

No one even cared what time it was, or had to worry about it, until the railroads were built and we had to synchonize time tables and time zones.

Liberty_One claims that he heard someone say that without different time zones to convert times back and forth to, the people in western China are having horrible problems.

He didn't expound upon exactly why that is the case, he just said that someone told him it's an awful problem. But, I really don't understand how the lack of a need for conversions to go back and forth between different time zones could be a problem.

Here is the basis for all the terrible confusion that Liberty_One is talking about, but it is lost on me. I don't understand how it could be a problem at all, let alone the horrific one described above.
Clipped from:
http://www.timegenie.com/time

"A country like China, which is really wide, should in theory, have 3 time zones but the government of China has chosen to have the whole country in the same time zone similar to Malaysia.

If you compare the sunrise and sunset information for Shanghai, which is located in the eastern part of China, to the sunrise and sunset information for Lhasa (Tibet), located in the most western part of China, then you will see there is a huge difference. Sunrise in Shanghai might be at 6:30 AM while sunrise in Lhasa will be probably closer to 9 AM. Meanwhile, sunset in Shanghai will be around 5:30 PM and sunset in Lhasa will be at around 7:30 PM. Yet, both cities share the same time as do all cities within China."

To me, the whole issue of what the clock said was a total nonissue. As far as I could ever tell, the only purpose of clocks is for us to synchronize our activities with the activities of others. Like, when will the train leave, the plane take off, etc.

And, in my experience, the sun has always risen at dawn, and it has always gone down at sunset. But, I suppose that there were a few exceptions, such as when the sun was obscured by clouds.

Probably the greatest part of my ambivalence about what the clock says is some experiences I had in far western Kansas right along the Colorado line. That is the demarcation line between Central and Mountain time, and the counties on the western border of Kansas have always been free to choose which time to go with.

In the middle 70s, it was Cheyenne county that went with Mountain time, later it was Sherman county, just south of it, that went with Mountain time. It has always seemed that there was one, and only one, holdout along the western border of Kansas that just had to put a little rectangle along the line between Central and Mountain time.

There is one advantage of being along the demarcation line between time zones for the younger crowd, and that is that late at night, if you drive really fast, you can beat the clock and get to the first liquor store before it closes, since they are on Mountain time and therefore open later. Unfortunately, that led to a few tragedies, as younger people would be driving at speeds in excess of 100 mph, and they apparently forgot that there are exactly two curves in about a 35 mile stretch of the highway. A cluster of little white crosses on those curves reminds us of those tragedies today.

But, that wasn't what I was thinking about when I started writing. I was thinking about the large amount of ridiculous friction generated when Cheyenne county was going back and forth between Central and Mountain time one year.

The banks in St. Francis, Kansas were on different times that year. One depositor got so mad about it that he closed his account at one bank and crossed the street to the other bank that had a time more to his liking.

I know a man and wife that were on different times that year. I forget the exact time she stated to her husband that year, but it was along the lines of, "It's at seven my time, eight your time."

And, one man that I know overheard two little old ladies furiously discussing how the time was being messed with. He told me that he heard one said to the other, "Ever since they started messing with the time, my roses wouldn't bloom right!"

Those stories are all true. But, like I pointed out before, the sun always comes up at dawn, and it always goes down at sunset.

The major flaw in the letter is that states (and even some counties) are under no obligation to observe DST. They can opt out as have Arizona and (until recently) parts of Indiana. So it is less like the tyrannical jackboot of federal power and more like the "poke her with the soft cushions" power of Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition.

Ok Arizona you want to play rough and defy us. Bring out the "Comfy Chair"! Dum, Dum. Dum.......

Personally, I liked the time used in Arabia and East Africa. At sunrise the clocks were set to 12:00 ( high noon in our view) and being near the equator it was roughly 12 hours to sunset. very simple and very "earthy" Just remember to have lunch at 6:00.